Little sister’s turn for hobby electronic party favors

[Ian Lee, Sr.] made something special for his daughter’s birthday party. It’s pretty common for girls of this age (this was her 5th birthday) to be enthralled with stories of princesses so he made a blinky princess wand for each party guest. The motivation came when she asked what special thing he was going to do for her celebration. You may remember seeing the LED badge kits that were featured at her brother’s party earlier this year. From the look of the party guests he surely satisfied her desire for a memorable party.

The project is very inexpensive, extremely easy to assemble, and might make a perfect kit for supervised Kindergarteners. It’s basically an LED throwie with a stick and a feather added. [Ian] used CR2032 batteries along with an LED and current limiting resistor to light things up. He clipped off one leg of the LED and replaced it by soldering the LED in place. The remaining leads were then pressed to either side of the coin cell and the whole thing was shoved into a slit cut in the end of a balloon rod. The whole thing was wrapped tightly in with a rubber band before being crowned with a ping pong ball. To trim it out he hot glued a feather at the base of the ball.

The only think that has us worried is what he’s going to do next year to top these parties.

Yea, that would have been ideal but would have made assembly much more difficult and time consuming. Being able to assemble 20 of these in under two hours with other events going on meant that it had to be simple.

What I would have really liked would have been some sort of tilt/motion type sensor that could have been included in the ball to have it only shine when being waved but I didn’t have anything like that available and didn’t have time to order.

Regardless, I have one of these that has been burning bright for two weeks now. So, I think the odds of the battery going bad before the wand is destroyed is very small ;)

I guess a far out dad has to remember to be far out all the time. What do you tell the boys balk having a princess wand? That it’s a wand for a sorcerer? But that might open a can of worms They are probably to young to understand being told it’s also like the wand that Merlin from King Arthur uses.